We need to talk about hate

Hello,

A few months ago I posted a video on Instagram in which I said disability was a feminist issue.

Within 24 hours I had received over 700 hate comments.

And I mean hate comments.

I’ll spare you the details and summarise. There were the usual sexist-ableism classics, like saying the reason my friend

Ellen Jones

(who was also in the video) and I are disabled is because we are fat (you sort of have to laugh). There was the usual unrefined misogyny, which is almost too boring to describe. There was a healthy dose of homo- and transphobia (Ellen and I are both gay), which I guess is new for me and obviously horrifying but not exactly surprising given, well, the state of the world.

And then there was the stuff about my appearance and, of course, my voice.

I was mocked. I was compared to a broken dishwasher and a malfunctioning hard drive. I was told never to speak again (fat chance). I was called a waste of taxpayer’s money. It was variously suggested that I be ‘unplugged,’ ‘rolled into the sea’ or ‘put in a home’.

I saw a derogatory word for people with CP more than I have in my thirty years on earth combined.

Hundreds of people used the r-word.

And all of this over the course of a single day. Eventually, we had to turn off the comments.

I’ve been hesitating to write about this, partly because I know it will worry my friends and family and partly because I want to pretend to myself that it doesn’t matter.

But hey, what do you know? It does matter. Of course it matters. It matters that people react to bodies that move and sound like mine with anger and hate. It matters that they want me and my friends not only out of public life but out of any sort of life. It matters that they think these are acceptable things to say.

And it matters that I live every single day of my life knowing that these things are true.

Almost as hurtful as the comments themselves was the well-meaning insistence from others that they somehow weren’t real. That the fact that people don’t call me a broken dishwasher to my face somehow makes it ok that they think it in the first place. That because it’s only online somehow means I shouldn’t worry about whether the man leering at me in Tesco will turn violent. How could that possibly be true?

Sometimes I’ll be telling a story about something that’s happened to me or talking about a political problem (cough, assisted dying, cough), and someone will ask me how these things can possibly be happening. More and more these days, I can’t be bothered to sugar-coat the answer, which is that a not insubstantial part of the population hates disabled people. People, let me tell you, really, really do not like this answer. I think it forces them to confront their own prejudices, or to wonder if people they love harbour them. They are quick to accuse me of hyperbole, or to excuse hatred as misinterpreted ignorance. But I don’t mean it as an accusation; I am simply offering up the truth. It’s a shame, in a way, that we turned off the comments on that post. If nothing else, they were proof of what I’ve been saying all along.

The paradox for me personally is this: I know that people feel this way about my body and my voice and I know that hatred could spill out into ‘real life’ at any time, and yet I know that the only way to challenge it is to be as vocal and visible as possible. In the perverseness of the current political moment, I know I am lucky that I do not really fear physical violence, which is more than many in my own communities can say. The abuse, I suppose, simply breads fear of more abuse. Every time I speak, I am knowingly putting my head above the parapet. I am happy to do so, but it does lead to the feeling that I am living my life on a perpetual front line.

What my friends and I need from you is not reassurance that these things only happen online, or evidence of all the people who don’t hate disabled people. What we need is for you to take up arms with us - and recognise that we are, in so many ways, still in the trenches.

Speak soon,
Lucy